Gary Gulman has a distinct sense of the mundane. Observational comedy is the foundation of his work, and classic Gulman jokes are often about noticing undercurrents and tensions that appear constantly but have grown too ubiquitous for most people to see. One of his best-known jokes is a long exploration of the experience of shopping at Trader Joe’s. He has a joke about the photos of missing kids on the sides of milk cartons, and one about the snobbery of the shape of a Yoplait container, and another about the weirdness of ordering room service.
While his special Born on 3rd Base is an hour of comedy about Gulman’s childhood, getting a burrito at Chipotle (with a joke I haven’t been able to stop thinking about), and the absent historical record of famous Jewish hockey players, it is most insistently an hour of comedy about income inequality. Gulman does not try to hide this; it’s not the kind of theme you realize has been building only after the fact. After some introductory gestures, including a dig at comedians who do too much crowdwork, Gulman moves into material about growing up poor and quickly connects it to his fury at American rhetoric about welfare programs. “The indignities they thrust upon poor kids never end,†Gulman says.
Gulman is tall and broad-chested, and he speaks at a careful, unhurried pace. The special was filmed in Toronto’s Great Hall with its classically elevated décor: There are white columns and red velvet curtains and a tasteful white arch above his head. Everything about his delivery and the room around him suggests he is a voice worth listening to, an authority figure. As a result, there’s some friction between his perspective on poverty and the space he’s inhabiting. He’s commanding a crowd that we never see but whose voices echo from somewhere far away, and what he wants the audience to know is that school lunch programs are degrading. The lunch programs are also free-breakfast programs, he explains, and Gulman spins this into a joke about breakfast foods: Everyone knows that Pop-Tarts come in packs of two, but the school breakfast only ever gave you one. As he puts it: “I’m poor — I am not stupid!†The joke then moves into an excoriation of Pop-Tarts as a food, with Gulman imagining someone at the Pop-Tarts factory asking if they should spread the frosting all the way to the edges and a cruel boss yelling, “Do you want these kids to ever stop sucking at the government teat?!â€
With this, Gulman sets the tone and establishes the mechanisms for the rest of the hour. His observations have the specific, unabashed purpose of describing poverty and its effects on American life. Often when comedians work in this mode, a joke stops after the observation’s been made. The object or the interaction was something everyone ignored, and now it has been made visible again, and that’s the end of it. Jerry Seinfeld, the titan of this kind of comedy, has described it as spending lots of time writing jokes that mean “absolutely nothing.†Except that what becomes immediately obvious in Gulman’s work is that it doesn’t have to mean nothing. It could instead be the vehicle for an argument, the groundwork for a long and occasionally incensed piece of social commentary. Gulman insists his audience look at things they may not want to pay attention to. Born on 3rd Base does all of those things while also brimming with pristine joke writing, and on top of that, it finds the space for a crack at Jerry Seinfeld.
If the chief accomplishment of this special were just to take standard stand-up machinery and use it as the basis for a bigger argument about the world, that would already set it apart. But beyond being technically impeccable, there’s something radical about the topic Gulman chooses. Personal narratives about poverty, which he returns to frequently, run the risk of losing audience members to feelings of pity or heaviness. It can be challenging to get them back into a space where they can laugh. Gulman has decided to reject that concern. He works from the assumption that it is not shameful to have been poor nor is it a sore spot the audience should feel bad about finding funny. Instead, the ones who should feel ashamed are politicians and the wealthy. “You already have more money than you can spend,†Gulman imagines telling a rich person. “You’re going to leave this money to your children in a trust fund, and I just — I worry your children are going to lose their initiative and become dependent for generation after generation.†Gulman performs this with a confidence that verges on smugness, and his delivery is a crucial part of his argument. It tells you that it’s embarrassing to think about poverty in a way that is any less humane than the one he’s presenting. It’s stupid, and it’s very fun to laugh about.
Part of the appeal is how much fun Gulman seems to be having. He grins like the cat who caught the canary. Occasionally he cocks his head in mock dismay, punctuating a punch line with a feint toward apology before the luxuriating smile returns in full force. Gulman pulls that theme into multiple contexts — not just his own childhood and palpable rage about welfare policies but also customer-service interactions, Banana Republic, Shark Tank, dentistry, plastic straws, and empathy as a unifying but burdensome experience. He swings at his own industry, too, deriding the wild discrepancy between how much money he now makes and how much Seinfeld makes by doing essentially the same job. The Seinfeld material is delightfully petty, and perhaps it’s just a coincidence that Seinfeld also has a famous joke about Pop-Tarts, which happens to be the joke that comedian said was a joke about nothing. Or maybe it’s not a coincidence after all.
What’s most exciting about this hour is not just the incredible precision of Gulman’s material or his perfectly dialed-in persona — knowing, a little cocky, just a hair too self-assured. It’s that Gulman has the vision and the desire to push his work in this direction he’s so clearly invested in, and he has the instinct to do it with no pulled punches and no excuses for talking about something that might make his audience feel bad. It’s thrilling to watch, and it delivers on the implicit promise Gulman makes by getting on the stage. The politics never undermines the jokes; it only makes the jokes land harder.